September 28, 2018

Realignments

  • Critical Realignments were once a common event in American politics

  • A major change in the party system occurred about 30 years until 1936

  • Beginning in 1936, the party system froze outside the south: Democrats party of labor, Republicans party of business (Lipset & Rokkan, 1967)

  • One impediment to broad change: stable partisanship attachments

Partisans are Loyal to their Party

  • In 21st century elections, 90% of Republicans support their party's Presidential candidate

  • During Watergate, majority of Republicans supported Nixon (dipped below 50% twice)

  • Around 80% of Republicans approve of President Trump's job performance

Partisanship as Stable Self-Identity

  • "However party and religious identifications come about, once they take root in early adulthood, they often persist. Partisan identities are enduring features of citizens’ self-conceptions." (Green, Palmquist & Schickler, 2002)

The Folk Theory of Partisan Stability

  • American political behavior is usually assumed to be time-invariant

  • "Extraordinary durability of voting habits" (Key, 1949)

  • Implicit in idea of "The Normal Vote" (Converse, 1964)

  • "[Absent realignments], as with religion, people are often adherents of a particular political party because their great-grandparents favored it for entirely different reasons" (Achen & Bartels, 2016)

A Recent Change

  • Between 2012 and 2017, 13% of partisans (net) switched from one major party to the other (Voter Study Group)

  • In the Pew American Trends panel, 10% of partisans (net) switched

  • Switching was concentrated among the young, age was demographic most predictive of switching

Roadmap

  • Show that Partisan Defections were higher Pre-realignment

  • Show that demographics weren't predictive of partisanship

  • Evaluate whether partisanship is unstable broadly or only among new entrants to the electorate

My Contributions

  • First individual-level dataset covering period before the New Deal

  • High levels of partisan instability were the norm from 1908 to 1928

  • Social groupings don't explain partisanship (important for theoretical predictions see Mason (2016))

  • Classic theories of socialization don't explain heterogeneities in party stability before 1930

  • Current instability is structurally different than instability before the New Deal

1920 Census

Voter Records - 1912 & 1914

Data

  • California Great Registers, 1908-1968 (today through 1930 only)

  • Registers contains 57 million name, address, occupation and party registration records

  • California had closed primaries

  • Microfilm copies scanned and converted to text by Ancestry.com

  • Supplemented with personally identified 1920-1940 census data from the Minnesota Population Center (IPUMS), matched exactly on name and address

Data

  • California Great Registers, 1908-1930

  • Registers contains 57 million name, address, occupation and party registration records

  • California had closed primaries

  • Microfilm copies scanned and converted to text by Ancestry.com

  • Supplemented with personally identified 1920-1930 census data from the Minnesota Population Center (IPUMS), matched exactly on name and address

Why California?

  • Only state where clean individual panel data is available at scale

  • We know the New Deal realignment happened there, can parse mechanism

  • Except for 1924, county-level Presidential vote share similar to rest of non-South

  • Literary Digest Polls show Presidential vote switching only 3-5 points higher in California than rest of country (Erikson & Tedin, 1981)

Why 1908 - 1930?

  • Predates scientifically sampled polls

  • Window into political behavior under a different party system

  • Issues contested were very different

  • Post-1936 U.S. party system froze around issues of capital vs labor (Lippset & Rokkan, 1967)

  • Maybe freezing of partisanship and axis of policy contestation wasn't mere coincidence

  • Group identities were weak, little difference in partisanship by age, gender (See Spahn's Before The American Voter, 2018)

  • Small differences by parents' national origin, class

Two-Party Consolidation

Rates of Party Switching

  • 2014 - 2016 (major party voters): 10% (Pew, 2017)

  • 1992-1996 (major party voters): 4% (ANES, 1997)

  • 1965-1973 (major party voters): 6% (Jennings & Niemi, 1973)

  • 1908-1928 (major party voters): 10% every four years

  • 1920-1930 (major party voters): 16%

Quadrennial Panel Data

  • Match Great Registers to themselves in successive Presidential Years

  • Match exactly on Name and Address

  • Errs strongly on the side of caution

  • Matching errors lead to inflated instability, so minimize instability by matching exactly

  • Restricting to non-movers reduces switching rate by 15%

  • Exact matching gives nearly identical results to Bayesian probabilistic record linkage (McVeigh, Spahn & Murray, 2018)

Partisan Stability?

Partisan Stability? No

Partisan Defections

Party by Gender

Party by Age

Implications of Socialization Theory

Need to test if high rate of party switching is compositional or broad-based. Socialization theory says…

  • People with more experience voting for a party should be more stable (partisan habituation)

  • Older people should be more stable (longer period of socialization)

  • Voters just coming of age should be especially unstable (generational model, Ghitza & Gelman, 2014)

Women

  • California Women first voted in 1912

  • Claim: because parents didn't expect them to vote, would have gotten less partisan socialization from parents (Andersen, 1979)

  • Conventional prediction: less partisan socialization would lead to more instability, voters "not immunized" to political forces by childhood partisan socialization

  • Claim in literature: Women contributed to new deal realignment by converting to Democratic Party more often than men (Corder & Wolbrecht, 2016)

  • Women's registration rate about 75% of men's

  • Matching process excludes women that change their name

Party Switching By Gender

Party Switching By Age - 1920-30

Party Switching Rates for Native-Born Americans:

  • 10% (1916 - 1920)
  • 14% (1920 - 1924)

Party Switching Rates for Foreign-Born Americans:

  • 14% (1916 - 1920)
  • 18% (1920 - 1924)

Party Switching By Age - 1920-30

Party By Age (again)

Summary of Socialization Results

  • Except for modest age effects, little heterogeneity in switching pre-realignment

  • Socialization is less important in partisan attchments pre-1930

  • Perhaps most and least experienced voters switch parties for similar reasons

  • Non-socialized attachments may be in play

  • The fact that identities aren't differentiated in partisan may contribute to weak attachments (Mason, 2016)

Generational Distinctiveness

  • Generational Replacement has replaced realignment as the engine of political change

  • High rates of switching by young people is consistent with the formation of political generations (Ghitza & Gelman, 2014)

  • Before 1930, little partisan differentiation by age

  • Present day: older voters are most Republican, declining as share of voters

  • Present day: youngest voters are most Democratic, rising as share of electorate

Conclusions

  • New data makes historical political behavior tractable

  • Individual partisanship less stable before 1928

  • Instability was hidden by stable macropartisanship

  • Present era of partisan stability began after New Deal realignment

  • Folk theory doesn't hold pre-realignment

  • Present instability is different than pre-realignment, concentrated among the young

  • Barring broad instability, critical realignment seems unlikely

Auxiliary Slides

Ongoing Research

  • Family socialization and gender dynamics with Shanto Iyengar

  • 100 years of partisan geographic sorting with Jonathan Rodden & Shanto Iyengar

  • Decompose the New Deal realignment into component sources of change: conversion, mobilization, migration (conversion accounts for almost all of it)

The Form

Voter Records - 1932 & 1934

California as a representative case

Registration vs. Vote Choice

Two-Party Consolidation

Two-Party Consolidation

Census Matching

  • Match 1920 and 1930 censuses exactly to Great Registers of same year

  • Use fastlink (Enamorado et al) to match 1920 to 1930 census

  • Match censuses on first, last, street name, age, occupation and place of birth of mother, father and self

  • Use only matches with probability of matching > .995

Defections by County

Defections in San Francisco

Party Composition

Proposition 14

  • In 1930, voters passed referendum amending registration laws

  • Starting in 1932 election, those that voted in any election had registration rolled over to following election

  • Non-voters (no vote in general or primary) were still purged

  • To isolate new registrants, identify voters on Presidential rolls, but missing from midterm rolls

  • Use fastlink from Enamorado, Fifield & Imai to match extremely loosely, identify non-voters

  • Cases that had at least one match of Pr > .2 considered matched. Allows many false positives to minimize false negatives.

  • Match rate post-1936: 88.6%

Partisan Stability by Match Status

Party Defections as % of All Voters

Net Change in Democratic Registration

Defections in Presidential Vote Choice

Class Composition by Party

Male Partisan Defections by Class

Female Registration Rate

Male Party by Class

Party by Nativity

Partisan Change by Father's Origin